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The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Habsburg Empire helped patronise and promulgate many of the ideals of Renaissance humanism, including northern European varieties often eclipsed in the historiography by the splendour of the Italian Renaissance. Sample some of the paintings, sculptures, tapestries, sketches and even ceremonial arms & armour associated with the Habsburgs, including works by the German master, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), and by Titian (ca. 1488-1576).

It's interesting to compare Europeans' travels in the Age of Discovery with those of earlier travellers, some of them imaginary (such as the famous, but alas fictional, English explorer, Sir John Mandeville), some no less wide-ranging than their later counterparts; read, for instance, about the travels of the Muslim Ibn Battuta in the 14thC.

Europeans in the Age of Discovery were not of one mind about how to regard the new worlds they had come upon (as reflected in Shakespeare's treatment of the subject in The Tempest). Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494-1573), a theologian and confidant of the humanist Habsburg Emperor Charles V, put forth one famous and influential theoretical argument "On the Reasons for Just War against the Indians" (1547). Sepúlveda, who never set foot on American soil, was opposed by Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566), a Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas (in Mexico). Las Casas wrote a "Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies" (1542), one of the earliest & most coherent condemnations of European colonialist practices. The two men met in 1550-51 to for a formal disputation at the University of Valladolid (in Spain), conducted according to the traditional scholastic protocol of medieval university debates. (Each of the two disputants later claimed to have won.)

Europe experienced its 1st major outbreak of syphilis, the most feared & deadly of pre-AIDS venereal diseases, in 1495. Coming so shortly after Columbus's epoch-making journey, the disease has often been hypothesised to have originated in America & brought over to Europe by early explorers. Recent research has provided clues in both directions, some of it supporting the hypothesis, others contradicting it.

Europeans in the Age of Discovery were dumbstruck by the wealth they discovered in the Americas, and were quick to despoil them of their silver and gold; hear a chemist's explanation of why gold is the most coveted precious metal in history.

Check out high-res images of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's famous paintings, Peasant Wedding and Peasant Dance (oil on wood; ca. 1568)

Dame Helen Mirren now plays the role of Prospera in a new screen adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest.